‘Guardian angel’ pastor arrives just in time to wake up Dallas woman in her freezing home
Her friends alerted a nearby church when they couldn’t reach her by phone, hoping someone could arrive as soon as possible to check on her.
Carol Uberbacher and Pastor Bobbyray Williams pose together for a portrait at her home in Dallas on Sunday, February 21, 2021. Uberbacher lost power at her home after Winter storm Uri hit Dallas last Sunday, and Pastor Williams woke her up from hypothermic reaction after a group from her church couldn t get in touch with her.(Lola Gomez / Staff Photographer)
Freezing weather hits Matamoros migrant camp where asylum-seekers are days away from U.S. entry
‘We are frozen here,’ says a Honduran immigrant in a camp near the Rio Grande.
Scenes from the Matamoros camp of asylum-seekers shows rough conditions for those inside tents covered with tarps on Monday, Feb 15, 2021. Photos taken by asylum-seeker Rolando, who wanted his surname kept private.(Rolando)
About a thousand asylum-seekers in a tent camp in Matamoros near the Rio Grande spent a frigid and anxious Monday night in below freezing temperatures as a winter storm spread across Texas and northern Mexico.
“We are frozen here,” texted a Honduran man at the camp named Rolando who asked that his full name not be used because of the nature of his persecution claim in U.S. immigration courts. “There is so much cold in the camp of migrants.”
Injured migrants say Border Patrol sent them back to Mexico after they fell off Trump’s wall
Immigrant rights advocates say their stories raise questions about the protocols used by the Border Patrol to treat injured migrants and the overall effectiveness of the border wall.
Neighbors in Anapra, Mexico, across from Sunland Park, New Mexico, describe how migrants climb over the new border wall in a minute, or less. Sometimes, they injure themselves, and such incidents are routine.(Alfredo Corchado / The Dallas Morning News)
PALOMAS, Mexico – To escape the lingering, devastating effects of two hurricanes and the reach of organized crime, Pedro Gomez fled Guatemala in January and headed north, looking for hope.
Asylum-seeking immigrants forced to remain in Mexico under a controversial Trump-era program will be processed for entry into Texas as soon as next Friday, setting off optimism and a scramble to safely welcome them among resettlement agencies.
Under the Biden administration initiative, as many as 300 people a day will be processed into the U.S., senior White House officials said. They had previously arrived in the U.S. to legally seek refuge before being forced to wait back in Mexico under the program called Migration Protection Protocols, also known as Remain in Mexico,
There are about 25,000 such cases pending in a program that enrolled a total of about 70,000. Mexican camps and shelters where most of them live while waiting to be summoned to the U.S. for their asylum hearings often lack adequate health care and medical supplies.
Anxiety rises over continuing deportations and swift-changing immigration policies
Among recent deportees is a Mexican woman who witnessed the El Paso massacre in 2019.
President Joe Biden’s hundred-day moratorium on deportations was supposed to ease anxieties in immigrant communities after four years of harsh crackdowns by the recently ended administration.
But across the nation, deportations continue at about the same pace as before Biden was inaugurated Jan. 20. That’s because the Texas attorney general sued to stop the policy change, with a judge issuing a temporary injunction on the moratorium through Feb, 23.
The fight over deportations in the courts and the halls of Congress signals the difficulty the Biden administration will have in changing immigration policy. Immigrant families are feeling increased anxiety and fear as they cope with a changing landscape.